I learned nothing. Most of this seems like common basic advice, wrapped up in AI written paragraphs...
Initially from the title, I thought it would be about brainstorming and launching a successful idea, and that sort of thing.
I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack
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Re: I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack
#12A lot of this advice is good or at least interesting. A lot of it is questionable. Python is completely fine for the backend. And using SQLite for your prod database is a bad idea, just use Postgres or similar.
Python will take you a long way, but its ceiling (both typical and absolute) is far lower than the likes of Go and Rust. For typical implementations, the difference may be a factor of ten. For careful implementations (of both), it can be a lot more than that. Does the difference matter? You must decide that. As for your dismissing SQLite: please justify why it’s a bad idea. Because I strongly disagree.
What a load of nonsense.
Re: I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack
#13You already have and had everything you need to scale the business to max and it hasn’t happened so more money won’t help.
What do you want VC to do?
You didn’t bring a plan.
Re: I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack
#14A lot of this advice is good or at least interesting. A lot of it is questionable. Python is completely fine for the backend. And using SQLite for your prod database is a bad idea, just use Postgres or similar.
I think the point is that your Python webapp will have more problems scaling to let's say 10,000 customers on a 5$ VPS tham Go. Of course you can always get beefier servers, but then that adds up for every project
Re: I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
Python will take you a long way, but its ceiling (both typical and absolute) is far lower than the likes of Go and Rust. For typical implementations, the difference may be a factor of ten. For careful implementations (of both), it can be a lot more than that. Does the difference matter? You must decide that. As for your dismissing SQLite: please justify why it’s a bad idea. Because I strongly disagree.
What a load of nonsense.
Why is it nonsense? Sounds reasonable to me.
Re: I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack
#16Is infra where investors money is going? I imagined salaries would be it. Marketing costs maybe.
Re: I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack
#17> If you need a little breathing room, just use a swapfile. You should always use a swap file/partition, even if you don't want any swapping. That's because there are always cold pages and if you have no swap space that memory cannot be used for apps or buffers, it's just wasted.
I always thought I had to add a swap file to avoid crashing with OOM. I wasn't aware of the cold pages overhead.
Sometimes that crashing is what I want: a dedicated server running one (micro)service in a system that'll restart new servers on such crashes (e.g. Kubernetes-alike). I'd rather have it crash immediately rather than chugging along in degraded state.
But on a shared setup like OP shows, or the old LAMP-on-a-vps, i'd prefer the system to start swapping and have a chance to recover. IME it quite often does. Will take a few minutes (of near downtime) but will avoid data corruption or crash-loops much easier.
Basically, letting Linux handle recovery vs letting a monitoring system handle recovery
Re: I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack
#18Nice list! I'd say the SQLite with WAL is the biggest money saver mentioned.
One note: you can absolutely use Python or Node just as well as Go. There's Hetzner that offers 4GB RAM, 10TB network (then 1$/TB egress), 2CPUs machines for 5$.
Two disclaimers for VPS:
If you're using a dedicated server instead of a cloud server, just don't forget to backup DB to a Storage box often (3$ /mo for 1TB, use rsync). It's a good practice either way, but cloud instances seem more reliable to hardware faults. Also avoid their object store.
You are responsible for security. I saw good devs skipping basic SSH hardening and get infected by bots in Take care and have fun!
Re: I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack
#19I was writing about this recently [0]. In the 2000s, we were bragging about how cheap our services are and are getting. Today, a graduate with an idea is paying $200 amounts in AWS after the student discounts. They break the bank and go broke before they have tested the idea. Programming is literally free today.
Re: I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack
#20I learned nothing. Most of this seems like common basic advice, wrapped up in AI written paragraphs... Initially from the title, I thought it would be about brainstorming and launching a successful idea, and that sort of thing.
Usually when there's "on a [low] $/mo" you'll hear basic advice. You'd be surprised to find out many folks are not aware of this!